The Brown Thrasher, East and West, 193 



Just at the close of my studies at Grinnell there appeared 

 to be a tendency for the Thrashers- to prefer the premises of 

 the houses which had originally been built upon the open 

 prairie, about which thickets of the sort ]\Iiss Sherman men- 

 tions were growing up, but there was no diminution of the 

 numbers in the hedges. 



Brown Thrasher at Oberlin, Ohio. 



The species is not at all common as a breeding bird, al- 

 though it may become common for a day or more during the 

 spring migration. Here the Osage orange hedges seem to be 

 not only the favorite nesting places, but some nests in or- 

 chards, a few in the hawthorn thickets and red cedar trees, and 

 occasionally a nest is found in a brush pile. This was once a 

 densely forested region, and therefore it is altogether likely 

 that the Thrashers were originally confined to the river gorges 

 where such thickets as they normally inhabit were to be 

 found. 



Lynds Tones. 



